Rudolf Vrba, 81, Auschwitz Witness, Dies

Rudolf Vrba, who as a young man escaped from Auschwitz and provided
the first eyewitness evidence not only of the magnitude of the tragedy
unfolding at the death camp but also of the exact mechanics of Nazi
mass extermination, died on March 27 at a hospital in Vancouver,
British Columbia. He was 81.

His wife, Robin, said he died of cancer.

After the war Dr. Vrba went on to become a distinguished medical
researcher in Israel, Britain, the United States and Canada, writing
dozens of papers.

But his greatest importance is as an author of a much different
paper — one with diagrams of gas chambers and crematories. With
remarkable specificity gained from camp jobs that gave him unusual
access to various corners of Auschwitz, including the gas chambers, Dr.
Vrba told the unknown truth about it.

The report became known as the Auschwitz Protocol. When parts of it
were released in the summer of 1944, the United States government
endorsed it as true. Neither Dr. Vrba's name nor that of a fellow
escapee, Alfred Wetzler, was given, in order to protect their safety.

The two other escapees and a Polish Army major whose information was
added to the final protocol also went unidentified. Many history books
still omit the names, although the document itself is central to many
discussions of the Holocaust. It was used as evidence at the Nuremberg
trials.

Dr. Vrba's wife said his name, virtually unpronounceable in English,
is generally mispronounced as VER-ba. But he made it known by telling
his story, most notably in his 1963 autobiography, "Escape From
Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive." His influence grew even more after he
appeared in Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary, "Shoah."

"The strength of the Final Solution was its secrecy, its
impossibility," he said in an interview in 2005 with The Ottawa
Citizen. "I escaped to break that belief that it was not possible. And
to stop more killings."

As the Holocaust enveloped European Jews and other groups vilified
by the Nazis, news of the atrocities seeped only gradually to the
outside world. By early 1941, however, the British had learned about
massacres, and later that year, Jan Karski, a leader of the Polish
underground, informed President Franklin D.
Roosevelt of the unfolding horror.

On Dec. 17, 1942, the Allies issued a statement saying Jews were
being taken to the camp and killed.

But the specifics of what was happening at Birkenau, the part of
Auschwitz devoted to extermination, began to come to general attention
only in January 1944, when a report prepared by the underground there
was smuggled out and reached officials in Washington and London. No
action was taken, however.

Then, on April 4, an Allied spy plane over Poland happened to
photograph Auschwitz while documenting construction of a
synthetic-fuels plant. The next day, a prisoner escaped to warn Czech
Jews.

On April 7, Mr. Vrba and Mr. Wetzler escaped. On April 24, they
reached Zilina, in northern Slovakia, where they worked with Jewish
leaders on their report. The two men provided separate but consistent
accounts. Factual assertions were checked against records whenever
possible. (Mr. Wetzler died in 1988.)

The 32-page report was sent to the British and United States
governments, the Vatican and
the International Red Cross. Most important, it went to the leadership
of Hungary's Jews, next on Hitler's list.

It had been the construction of a new rail spur to the gas chambers
that prompted Mr. Vrba and Mr. Wetzler to risk their lives to try to
warn Hungarian Jews, the last major intact Jewish community in Europe.
They had heard Nazis talking about "Hungarian sausage" coming.

But Hungarian Jewish leaders did not issue a warning, a failure
that has been long debated. It has been suggested that the leaders
feared jeopardizing an ultimately unsuccessful deal they were
negotiating with Adolf Eichmann to save at least some Jews. There was
also concern that there was too little time for effective action.

Soon, it was too late by any measure. On June 6, two more Auschwitz
inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czeslaw Mordowicz, arrived in Zilina. They
reported that trainloads of Hungarian Jews were being massacred.

"Already 200,000 of these I had tried to save, those whom I
thought, indeed, I had saved, were already dead," Dr. Vrba wrote. That
total would more than double.

Mr. Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia, on
Sept. 11, 1924. Rudolf Vrba was the nom de guerre he adopted after
joining the Czechoslovakian resistance. He later made the change legal.

The young Walter Rosenberg was barred from school at 15 because he
was a Jew. He worked as a laborer until 1942, when he was arrested and
deported, first to the Maidanek concentration camp and then to
Auschwitz. His escape was harrowing: he hid under a woodpile while
guard dogs sniffed just inches away.

After the war, he earned his doctorate and did postdoctoral work in
Prague. After various posts as a medical researcher, he became a
pharmacology professor at the University of British Columbia in 1976, a
post he held until the early 1990's.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Zuza Vrbova
Jackson of Cambridge, England, and two grandchildren.

Dr. Vrba said he had devoted 95 percent of his time to science and 5
percent to the Holocaust. In both, he pushed beyond facts toward larger
interpretations.

He told The Jerusalem Post in 1998, for example, that he could
understand why some people doubted the true dimensions of the
Holocaust. There was nothing in their experience remotely comparable,
he said.